Vector Wars
By Lynda Weinman
If you've been on the Web long, you might be aware of a few ongoing controversies: Mac vs. PC, artist vs. programmer, Navigator vs. Explorer, ActiveX vs. plug-ins, and embedded type vs. typographers. We get to add a new dispute to the list now that Adobe and Macromedia are competing for ownership of a vector format for the Web. To explain both sides of the story, I'll describe what vectors are in the first place, and why anyone should care about 'em.
The most widely supported image formats on the Web are GIF, JPEG, and soon-to-be PNG. Part of the reason they're so widely supported is that these file formats are native MIME types to most browsers. This means that end viewers see these types of graphics easily, without changing any settings in their browsers or doing anything special beyond typing in a URL. Web developers like us can publish GIFs and JPEGs (and, soon, PNGs) to our hearts' content, without fear that they won't be viewable. As you can imagine, getting a file format accepted as a recognized MIME type by the browser vendors or the W3C can make or break a file format's viability.
GIFs, JPEGs, and PNGs are all bitmap formats, also known as "raster graphics" in some circles. A bitmap file is stored by the computer as a series of values, with each pixel taking a set amount of memory (see
Figure 1). That's why an image scaled at 100 percent will take more memory than the exact same image reduced to 50 percent.
Vector graphics are a different story.
